The Joliet woman charged with murder in the alleged beating of her infant daughter has a history of involvement with the state’s child welfare agency.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was still investigating a report of abuse against another of the woman’s children by her boyfriend when she was arrested Dec. 20, the agency confirmed.

Shanquilla Garvey, 24, was initially charged with aggravated battery to a child after prosecutors alleged in court papers that she threw her 9-month-old baby, Cherish Freeman, into a dresser drawer and then onto the floor at the Joliet motel where she was living. But officials upgraded the charge to murder Wednesday after the girl died on Christmas Eve.

Police said the baby’s injuries included two skull fractures and bleeding on the brain, and said she had previously suffered a broken collarbone. An autopsy determined she died of blunt-force trauma from an assault.

Garvey was involved with DCFS during her own childhood when she was adopted in the 1990s, and she has had intermittent contact with the agency since bearing her own five children.

In August 2016, DCFS opened two investigations into allegations of domestic violence between Garvey and a boyfriend in the home, said Neil Skene, special assistant to the director at DCFS. Both cases were closed as “unfounded,” meaning DCFS found no credible evidence of child mistreatment.

Then weeks later, in September 2016, Garvey called DCFS saying she felt overwhelmed by her child care responsibilities and was going to live in a shelter, Skene said. Garvey voluntarily had her children placed for three months with DCFS’ Safe Families program, in which host families take in children of parents going through crisis in cases that do not involve child abuse or neglect. The goal is to get the family through the crisis without the state taking custody.

DCFS had no additional contact with the family until this past Nov. 15, when a hotline call alleged that a boyfriend of Garvey had shoved her 5-year-old child. The DCFS investigator assigned to the case inspected the child and found no visible signs of abuse such as abrasions or bruises, Skene said. The boyfriend did not consent to a DCFS interview, but Garvey did. She said that the shove was unintentional and not harmful and said that her children were safe, the agency official said.

That investigation was still pending at the time of Garvey’s arrest Dec. 20.

DCFS Director Beverly “B.J.” Walker told the Tribune in a phone interview Thursday that she did not think DCFS dropped the ball in Garvey's case, but that the agency might have done better.

“This is a ball that's hard to catch,” Walker said. “If I had to say where we might have caught it in a better way, it is in that September 2016 call from Shanquilla that she felt overwhelmed. Safe Families gave us an opportunity for intervention that didn’t require custody, but clearly the trauma was continuing, and Shanquilla never seemed able to dig herself out of the hole.”

Walker had led changes in the department that were implemented following the death of another Joliet-area girl, Semaj Crosby, whose body was found under a couch in her squalid home in April. A DCFS worker had visited the home hours before the 17-month-old girl was reported missing, and the agency had conducted numerous investigations of alleged abuse and neglect at the home.